Everything you might want to know about how GuessTheCountry works — the rules, the data, and the design choices behind the game.
Yes. The game is completely free and works in any modern browser on desktop, tablet or phone. No download, no paywall, and no account is required to play. Signing in only unlocks saved scores and the global leaderboard.
No. You can play as a guest forever. If you create a free account (email or Google), your scores are saved, your stats persist across devices, and your best runs appear on the public leaderboard.
We curate a database of more than 1,000 notable figures across 114+ countries and 14 categories — including athletes, musicians, actors, scientists, business leaders, politicians, historical figures, artists and writers. Each entry is verified against Wikidata for accuracy.
Every person is scored from 1 (world-famous) to 10 (specialist knowledge) based on Wikipedia sitelink counts and manual review. Level 1 rounds only draw from difficulty 1–3, while Level 10 pulls from the full range. Endless Mode mixes everything.
All photos are sourced from Wikimedia Commons and only images released under reusable licenses (Public Domain, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA) are included. The photographer credit and license are preserved.
We use a deterministic rule that prefers a person's primary country of identity and career, not just birthplace. A manual override table handles well-known edge cases (e.g. athletes competing for national teams, historical figures with shifting borders). We deliberately exclude office-based citizenship such as Vatican City.
Please email us via the Contact page with the person's name and the country you believe is correct, plus a source if possible. Corrections are reviewed weekly and applied via our overrides table.
Within a single game session we never repeat a person. Across separate sessions, common people can reappear because they are drawn from the same pool of over a thousand entries.
You start with 3 lives and each round has a 10-second timer. Correct answers score +100 plus a time bonus (up to +50). Every 5-answer streak adds +200 bonus points and every 10-answer streak adds +500. Wrong answers or timeouts cost a life.
Endless Mode unlocks after you beat Level 10 once. It uses the full difficulty pool with no level breaks — how long can you keep your streak alive?
The game needs an internet connection to load photos and the person database. Once a session is loaded, most rounds continue to work even on flaky mobile connections thanks to background preloading.
We collect the minimum needed to run the game — an email if you sign in, plus your scores and gameplay stats. See our Privacy Policy for full detail on cookies, analytics and your GDPR/CCPA rights.
GuessTheCountry is suitable for players aged 10 and up. Younger children can play with a parent's help — most Level 1 figures are recognisable to primary-school kids. There is no violence, no gambling and no user-to-user chat.
Yes, and many do. The game works as a warm-up activity, a rainy-day filler or a term-long geography supplement. No account is required, it works on any device with a browser, and there is nothing to install or configure.
There is no native app yet. The web version is designed mobile-first and runs at native-app speed thanks to background preloading. You can add it to your phone's home screen from the browser share menu for a one-tap launch.
The current pool covers 114+ countries across every continent. We actively work to add more figures from Africa, South America, Central Asia and Oceania — regions that most English-language quizzes underrepresent.
New entries and corrections are added on a rolling basis, typically several times a month. Reader reports go into a weekly review queue.
Yes — please send suggestions via the Contact page. Include the person's name, country and a Wikipedia link if you have one. We prioritise underrepresented countries and categories.
The database records one canonical nationality per person, chosen using a deterministic rule (primary country of identity and career) with a manual override table for edge cases. If you think our canonical choice is wrong, please tell us and we'll review it.
No. Wrong answers score zero regardless of speed and cost one life. The speed bonus is only applied to correct answers.
The run ends and a summary screen shows your final score, accuracy, best streak and how many levels you cleared. From there you can start a fresh run or view the global leaderboard.
The leaderboard ranks by highest single-run score. Signing in is required to appear, so guest runs are not counted. The board updates in real time as new scores come in.
Yes. The end-of-run screen has a Share button that uses your device's native share sheet on mobile, and copies a shareable summary to the clipboard on desktop.
We use a small number of cookies for essential functionality (staying signed in) and for anonymous usage analytics via Google Analytics. Full detail is in the Privacy Policy.
Yes. The site is free to play and supported by unobtrusive display advertising. Ads never appear during a round and never interrupt gameplay.
Email us via the Contact page from the address associated with your account. We will delete your profile, saved scores and stats within seven days and confirm by reply.
Yes. On desktop you can select answers with the number keys 1–4 and press Enter to continue between rounds. Screen-reader labels are provided on all interactive elements.
Flags are a fast visual anchor that speeds up recognition, especially on mobile. They're rendered as SVGs so they remain crisp at any size and load in a fraction of the bandwidth of image sprites.
Not yet, but category-specific modes are on our roadmap. Endless Mode currently gives you the widest possible mix across all fourteen categories.
Not yet. All UI text and profile facts are in English today. Translations to Spanish, French and Portuguese are planned.
Real-time multiplayer is not currently supported. The easiest way to play together is to share the game on one screen and take turns, then compare scores on the leaderboard.
Photos are served directly from Wikimedia Commons. If a specific image is unreachable, the game skips that person and pulls the next one from the preloaded queue, so gameplay continues without interruption.
Score is a function of speed and streaks as well as correctness. Two players with the same 100% accuracy can end with very different scores depending on how fast they answered and how long their streaks were.
Use the Contact page. We read every message and reply personally to almost all of them, usually within a few days.
The blog has long-form articles on geography, memory science, celebrity trivia and the hardest countries to guess. The About page tells the story of how the project started and how the database is built.